Measures of Accessibility as Social Indicators: A Note

Author(s): Paul L. Knox

Source: Social Indicators Research , Jan., 1980, Vol. 7, No. 1/4 (Jan., 1980), pp. 367-377
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27521950

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 PAUL L. KNOX

MEASURES OF ACCESSIBILITY AS SOCIAL INDICATORS:

A NOTE

(Received August 22, 1978)

ABSTRACT. Although accessibility to jobs, services and amenities is an important

component of the quality of life, it is rarely articulated in operational definitions of the
concept. This note stresses the importance of physical accessibility to social well-being
in cities, and outlines and reviews several measures which could be used to reflect
territorial variations in accessibility to specific 'goods'. One measure - a modified
version of the gravity model - is elaborated in detail, and its utility as a social indicator
is illustrated using the example of accessibility to primary medical care in Edinburgh,
Scotland.

Most people concerned with the construction or use of normative or des

criptive social indicators ? both objective and subjective ? would probably
agree that their central objective is the measurement of social well-being,
the 'quality of life', or some aspect thereof. Furthermore, many would agree
with Pred that, "At the very least, the 'quality of life' in a city or region
refers to the accessibility of its inhabitants to employment alternatives,
educational and medical facilities, essential public social services, and 'nature'
or extensive recreational open spaces" (Pred, 1977, p. 10, emphasis added).
Nevertheless, accesssibility itself is rarely articulated in operational definitions
of the quality of life and the other conceptual vehicles (such as 'social well
being', 'welfare' and 'level of living') around which social indicators are
generally constructed. As a result, measures of accessibility are seldom used as
indicators in attempts to monitor system performance, to construct area
profiles, to compile social inventories, or to evaluate proposed planning
strategies. This is particularly surprising in view of the long-established
existence of accessibility in Western countries as a major goal in its own
right: political statements about national goals as well as lists of local priorities
compiled by urban and regional planners invariably include items related to
mobility and physical accessibility. Moreover, the importance of accessibility
is clearly reflected in national budgetary appropriations and in strategic
planning policies involving regional highway networks, urban motorways and

Social Indicators Research 7 (1980) 367-377. 0303-8300/80/0070-0367$01.10

Copyright ? 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A.

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368 PAUL L. KNOX

rapid transport systems. In this context, accessibility is generally seen as an

adjunct of the overall efficiency of urban and regional systems. Recently,
however, accessibility has been increasingly recognised as a major source of
people's real income, representing a distinct component of their quality of
life, which is especially important at the inter- and intra-urban levels of
analysis. In this context, urban systems themselves are seen as pools of scarce
and unevenly-spread resources and facilities (schools, parks, libraries, doctors'
surgeries, shops, etc.) from which residents benefit to varying degrees
according to their willingness and ability to overcome the physical barrier
of distance as well as financial barriers to resources in the market economy
and the social, psychological and educational barriers to resources in the
public domain. Geographers and urban sociologists have emphasised how
the spatial structure of urban systems constitutes a 'hidden mechanism'
which redistributes real income through the effects of differential accessi
bility and proximity to the city's 'goods' and 'bads' respectively (Harvey,
1973; Pahl, 1971; Smith, 1977). Pahl, for instance, illustrates this by
reference to the distance which occupants of new public housing on the out
skirts of Glasgow (Scotland) have to travel to shopping facilities. It is evident
that the costs ? physical, financial, or temporal ? of overcoming distance to
get to shops, jobs, and other 'facilities' can bring about quite substantial
redistributions of the real income of the residents of different parts of a city.
Of particular relevance here are the re distributive effects of externalities
associated with the siting of public and semi-public facilities within cities.
Some inequality inevitably results from the discrete location of facilities
amongst spatially continuous populations: the net benefits of schools,
parks and primary schools, for instance, are clearly higher for those living
nearby, who not only enjoy increased choice and opportunity but also
pay lower transport costs than those living further away. But since the
spatial organisation of cities reflects the outcome of the conflicting interests
of unequal socio-political groups, facility location decisions will, it is argued,
result in an unnecessary degree of inequality of accessibility, with the
externality effects tending to work in favour of the inhabitants of more affluent
neighbourhoods, (Harvey, 1973). This interest in the consequences of the
regressive nature of urban spatial structure has been paralleled by an
increased consciousness amongst planners and urban administrators of the
wider social implications of their own activities in siting public facilities
of various kinds (Davies, 1972; Cox, 1976). This has led, in turn, to an

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 ACCESSIBILITY 369

increased desire for more sensitive monitoring systems: an interest which

of course has been greatly stimulated by the whole social indicators mov
ment. There now exists an extensive literature concerned with the methodo
logy and application of territorial social indicators (see, for example, Knox,
1975, 1978; Smith, 1973; Little and Mabey, 1972). Few, however, have
addressed the crucial question of territorial variations in opportunity in terms
of accessibility to urban resources. This may be a result of the persistence of
the concept of accessibility as a derived need rather than as an importan
objective in its own right. The financial costs of travel, as well as the time
given up and inconvenience experienced as a result of travel are thus seen as
part of the costs associated with pursuing other goals, so that the whol
question of movement can be relegated to the status of a secondary and
transitional objective. As we have seen, however, there is a strong case for
regarding accessibility as a key component of the quality of life, at leas
at the metropolitan level of analysis. What seems to have hampered the deve
opment of measures of accessibility as much as any doubts as to its im
portance as a life goal is the ambiguity of most currently available data series.
Most of these relate to observed trip-making behaviour rather than spatial
opportunity per se, so that it is difficult to disentagle the facts of accessibilit
from the behavioural effects which it prompts. Journey?to?work data, for
example, show that people are now travelling further to work in most western
cities. But should this be interpreted as an improvement or a deterioration in
people's accessibility to employment? It is possible to justify either interpre
tation. People may be travelling further because improved transportatio
enables them to reach a more attractive job or live in a better home; or they
may be travelling further of necessity because they cannot find acceptable
employment near their homes, or acceptable accommodation near their
jobs (Wachs and Kumagai, 1973). It is possible, however, to derive useful
and unambiguous measures of accessibility from secondary data sources
It is the purpose of this note to briefly review these and to illustrate their
utility by way of some examples of their use as social indicators in different
contexts.
The simplest approach to the measurement of accessibility is to calculate
the number or density of opportunities of a particular type within a certain
distance, time or cost-range from the residential locations of the population
under consideration. Accessibility to employment, for example, can be
measured by the number of job sites which can be reached within a certain

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370 PAUL L. KNOX

target time or distance from people's homes. Such a procedure has been
successfully developed by the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies
at Cambridge, England in an attempt to devise indicators which could be used
in the evaluation of the 'performance' of different kinds of urban systems
(Echenique et al., 1969). Among the measures of accessibility they devised
were:

(1) A Social Interaction Indicator, designed to reflect the opportunities

of making social contacts, and measured in terms of the distance within
which residents can reach a given number of other residents via the road
network.
(2) An Employment Opportunities Indicator, designed to reflect the
accessibility of employment opportunities to residents, and measured in
terms of the distance within which residents can reach a given number of job
opportunities.
(3) A Service Availability Indicator, designed to reflect the accessibility
of services to residents, and measured in terms of the distance within which
residents can reach a given number of service employees.
(4) An Indicator of Proximity to Open Space, measured in terms of the
distance within which residents can reach a given area of open space (parks,
playing fields, recreation grounds, and so on).
Table I shows a comparison of the accessibility characteristics of the city
of Reading with those of the planned New Towns of Hook and Milton
Keynes. Such results give a reasonable idea of the performance of different
kinds of urban systems, and could equally be used to evaluate the probable
consequences of different planning strategies. Breheny (1974) has employed
similar measures in spatially disaggregated form in order to show the con
trasting effects of channelling forecast basic employment in Reading into
inner-city areas and suburban neighbourhoods through policies of concentra
tion and decentralization respectively. The approach can also be used to
provide descriptive measures which could be incorporated into a general
series of social indicators. Wachs and Kumagai (1973), for example, have
demonstrated this in a comparison of accessibility to health care facilities in
two contrasting census tracts of Los Angeles (Table II). One of their most
striking findings is the difference in the number of health care facilities
which can be reached from either census tract by automobile as compared
with public transport. From South Central Los Angeles only two hospitals
and eleven general practitioners can be reached within 30 minutes travel by

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 ACCESSIBILITY 371

TABLE I
Access opportunities in three English towns

Accessibility indicator Target figure Mean distances (Km) to target

figure for all Residents of:
Reading Hook Milton
Keynes
SOCIAL 1200 residents 1.78 1.55 1.77
INTERACTION 2400 residents 2.34 1.99 2.48
EMPLOYMENT 6000 jobs 2.30 1.61 2.71
12000 jobs 2.72 2.14 3.69
SERVICES 3000 service jobs 2.48 1.86 2.07
6000 service jobs 2.91 2.32 2.88
OPEN SPACE 375 hectares 2.26 2.45 2.68
750 hectares 3.26 3.81 3.57

Source: Echenique et al. (1969).

transit, whereas 40 hospitals and 335 general practitioners can be reached

within the same time by automobile. An important lesson, then, is that the
sensitivity of these measures of accessibility depends very much upon the

TABLE II
Accessibility to health care opportunities from two census tracts in Los Angeles

Accessibility to health care Tract 2392 Tract 5341

facilities (South Central (Bell Gardens)b
Los Angeles)8

Number of opportunities within By Auto By Transit By Auto By Transit

15 minutes travel.
General Practitioners 335 11 285 18
Hospitals and Clinics 40 2 41 0

Number of opportunities within

30 minutes travel.
General Practitioners 1534 112 1529 36
Hospitals and Clinics 143 14 149 1

a An area with high proportions of black residents, high proportions of families below
the poverty level, and relatively low levels of car ownership.
An area of white residents, with fewer families below poverty level and higher levels
of car ownership.

Source: Wachs and Kumagai (1973).

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 372 PAUL L. KNOX

extent to which they can be disaggregated by mode of transport. Moreover,

their utility as socid indicators in more formal and extensive state?of?the?
region reports might be constrained by the manpower required to locate all
of the relevant facilities and compute the necessary matrix of neighbourhood?
to?facility travel times. Nevertheless, the procedure could easily be
automated, as Wachs and Kumagai point out: "The locations of medical
facilities might be geo-coded, or summarized by zones, and standard trans
portation planning models could be used for the estimation of transit and
auto travel times" (Wachs and Kumagai, 1973,454). They have also proposed
a more sophisticated index of accessibility which would be easily computed
in the context of an automated, iterative procedure. Using the example of
accessibility to employment opportunities in a region of/zones, the index
is given as:

AI(T)i=^k
1UU; = ?%WE(T)ijk
1 /c = l

where AI(T) i = the accessibility index for zone / using a travel time radius of
T minutes; / = an income category : / = 1, 2,...J;k = an occupation category :
k = 1, 2,... K\ Pijk = the proportion of the labour force in zone i which is in
income category / and occupation category k;E(T)ijk = employment
opportunities (in hundreds) in income category / and occupation category k
within T minutes travel from zone i.
The index is thus a weighted summation of the number of employment
opportunities which exist within a certain travel time from zone i, in which
the weights and the jobs included are determined by the relevant categories
of income and employment. In addition to its ease of computation, the index
has the advantage of considerable flexibility: "For example by summing over
all occupation categories and adjusting Pijk so that they sum to one within
an income category, the gross accessibility for any one income category may
be determined and compared with indices for other income categories.
Similarly, summation may be performed over all income categories in order
to derive an index for a particular employment or occupation class" (Wachs
and Kumagai, 1973, 444). It would also be possible to compute separate
indices of accessibility for the two different modes of travel, to aggregate over
a series of spatial zones to obtain a summary index of accessibility for the
whole region, or to compute overall regional accessibility indicators by
income, employment category or mode of transport.
One important shortcoming of this index, however, is that it does not take

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 ACCESSIBILITY 373

into account the frictional effect of distance known as the distance?decay

function. It is known from the interaction between people and places in
wide variety of contexts that the effect of distance on people's movements
is more than proportional (Abler, Adams and Gould, 1972; Haggett, 1965),
with the relationship tending towards a negative exponential function.
Gravity models, which are frequently used in geography and urban and
regional planning to explain or predict spatial interaction of various kinds,
are specifically designed to handle distance-decay effects, and can be easily
modified to provide measures of accessibility which reflect more realistically
the relative level of spatial opportunity inherent in any one part of an urban
or regional system (Oberg, 1976; Smith, 1977; Symons, 1971). For any
of the n regional zones or city neighbourhoods, accessibility to a given set of
facilities (e.g. primary schools or doctors' surgeries) may be computed as:

Ai- /=i
2 (-*-)
Dijk
where Ai = accessibility in zone i; Sj - size (i.e. 'atractiveness') of facilities
in zone /; Dij = a measure of distance between zones / and/;/: = the distance
decay function.
The sensitivity of this measure can be somewhat improved by incorporating
measures of the relative mobility of the residents of different zones. The most
useful differentiating factor here is clearly between people able to use a car of
their own and those having to use public transport. The Ai measure can there
fore be weighted according to rates of car ownership, incorporating
parameters based on travel speeds by car and by transit in order to obtain
an index based on realistic travel times:

TAi = Ci(fa) + (100-Ci)(ft)

where TAi is the new index of accessibility for zone /, Ci is the percentage of
car-owning households in zone /, and Sa and St are the average times taken
to travel a given distance by automobile and by transit respectively. For ease
of comparison it is convenient to scale the TA values as percentages of the
highest computed value for each set of zones. The index then provides a
reasonably sensitive yet robust indicator of the accessibility of different
localities to a given spatial distribution of facilities. It could be argued,
however, that places with low accessibility are not particularly disadvantaged
if they contain relatively small numbers of people. In the context of most

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374 PAUL L. KNOX

social indicators research, attention will be focused on the distribution of

opportunities per person in each zone rather than on the inherent accessibility
of places. By weighting the TA index according to the number of potential
facility users for each zone it is in fact possible to obtain an index of relative
personal accessibility. The number of potential facility users in any one zone
(Mi) can be calculated as:
n Pi
Mi = 2 f-Z-i
i=i Di]'*'
where Pj is the population resident in zone /. This measure, which is general
ly known as 'market potential', accounts not only for facility users living in
the zone itself but also for users travelling from nearby zones. Scaling the Mi
values to percentages of the highest computed value enables the final index
of relative personal accessibility to be computed as:

T.._TAi(%)
Mi (%)
so that values greater than 100 indicate a relative local over-provision of
facilities.
The utility of the measure is best illustrated by way of a brief example.
Let us consider, for instance, the accessibility of residents in different parts
of a city ? Edinburgh ? to primary medical care in the form of general
practitioners. In calculating the index, the 'attractiveness' of facilities in each
zone {Sj) has been measured in terms of the total number of consultation
hours available with all of the doctors in a given neighbourhood,1 basic
distance measurements (Dij) have been taken as the linear distance between
the geometric centre of 54 census-based neighbourhood zones, and the
distance-decay parameter (k) has been calculated to be a negative exponential
function (1.52) from a regression analysis of the actual fall-off in the registra
tion of patients with distance from surgeries in urban areas (data were drawn
from Hopkins et al, 1968). Neighbourhood population sizes and levels of car
ownership have been derived from small-area census data, and average travel
times by automobile and transit were calculated from the actual travel times
by each mode between a sample of twenty pairs of points in the city. The
resultant indicator reveals quite marked variations in accessibility to primary
medical care (Fig. 1). If we accept that the city has a complement of general
practitioners which is just adequate in overall terms,2 the solid-shaded areas

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 ACCESSIBILITY 375

Fig. 1. Relative levels of accessibility to primary medical care in Edinburgh. See text
for an explanation of the key.

can be regarded as 'over-doctored', whereas areas with lower index scores,

shaded lighter, can be regarded as 'under-doctored'. As it happens, the pattern
of accessibility to primary care corresponds systematically but inversely with
the social geography of the city, despite the organization of the health
services into a supposedly egalitarian system some 30 years ago. It is not
within the scope of this note, however, to consider the extent to which
disparities in accessibility to medical care compound other patterns of socio
economic disadvantage, or to investigate the relationship between patterns
of morbidity and mortality and patterns of accessibility to medical care. The
point is simply that measures of accessibility of the kind described here can
provide a rich source of information if used as social indicators in any of a
wide variety of applications: in descriptive state?of?the-region reports, in
analytical studies of urban social ecology, and in prescriptive evaluations of
'system' performance. In this context, it is worth noting that it is also
possible to derive overall parameters of the 'equity' and 'efficiency' of facility
location patterns from the measure of accessibility described above. The

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376 PAUL L. KNOX

coefficient of variation derived from the vector of TAi values, for example,
provides a measure of equity: the lower the coefficient, the greater the
equity of accessibility between zones. The overall efficiency of a facility
location pattern in terms of the aggregate travel of people to facilities of
their choice can be computed as:

(TAi-Mi)
2M

where an increase in the magnitude of E is indicative of a

amount of travelling undertaken by people in using facilities
represents an increase in efficiency. Such statistics could
indicators themselves in inter-urban comparisons. Alter
could be used to weight measures of the overall per capi
facilities, thus enhancing the validity and sensitivity of
indicators of facility provision.
It should be stressed, though, that the utility of all of t
accessibility outlined here is very much dependent ? as
indicators ? on the quality of data inputs. In particular, it
maximise the sensitivity of the indices by using as fine a mesh
as possible. More sophisticated measures of personal mobili
account the availability of automobiles to individual family m
as the marked variability in average transport speeds at differ
day, for example ? would also be a desirable refinement. Fina
noting one common limitation of all 'closed' models whi
evaluate any set of point distributions: the influence of th
boundary on the statistical universe. Briefly, the danger is th
in peripheral areas may be under-estimated by indices of the
here because of the effects of people using facilities locat
the boundaries of the city or region in question. The extent
shortcoming must qualify the interpretation of such measur
dependent upon the nature of the facility concerned and
ritorial social indicators, the goodness?of?fit between th
or regional system and the boundary within which data have

University of Dundee,
Dundee, Scotland

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 ACCESSIBILITY 377
NOTES

1 Since health services are provided free of charge under the British Health Service, the
'attractiveness' of doctors' surgeries is not affected by price considerations.
2 The city's doctors have, on average, around 2000 patients each. This is considered by
the Scottish Medical Practices Committee to reflect an 'adequate' level of primary care.

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